Slaughter: The Cat Speaks Again
by IQ of a Walnut
Summary: After the Beldame, they leave her alone. Until they don't. Because all heroes grow up.


Citronella is a natural repellant to spiders and mosquitos. Kelpies have various myths but they are supposed to drown and eat the flesh of their victims. I have edited this only to the best of my own biased abilites. Please leave all your scathing and praise-filled reviews below-what other people think of my work matters to me so that I can make it better.

I own nothing.

**A crunch: afoot a dead arachnid  
Spanning once a serving plate –  
Oh! that others be alive  
With such as me for spider bait!**

After the Beldam, Coraline grows up like an almost normal child. She loves her parents more now, has more patience for them, and avoids buttons in favor of zippers. Wybie thinks little of it, but respects their friendship (and the little he saw of the needle hand) enough to avoid wearing buttons too near his face, and over time, she learns how not to hyperventilate when in the presence of large spiders.

For the most part, she gardens, she reads, and she laughs at Wybie's inability to keep his balance on his bike, then his ATV. He grows up awkward, head perpetually cocked to the side, and when they go to high school, they stay friends and ignore the people in the school that tag their lockers or steal their gym clothes.

One group of jocks decides to toss Wybie into a muddy hole, and because he has a black eye, he's squinting just enough to make out a strange new insect he's never seen before. It turns out that no-one else has seen it either, and the resulting celebrity status puts them, not above the others, but certainly out of the same sphere as other types of losers.

Coraline is casual friends with the other library aids, graduates without any tearful goodbyes, and signs up for a few general courses at the community college in Portland. She and Wybie chat once a week, then once a month, in a way that keeps him in her life, but not too close. Coraline likes it this way, because while she loves Wybie, she's not quite ready to be _in_ love with him yet. He visits the Pink Palace at the same time she does, and that is good enough for now.

She studies history, folklore, and literature. The fact that the Beldam was mentioned in a poem caught her interest (and gave her horrible chills), and though she used to hate it, research into obscure legends is now her favorite passion.

If she trips over stories about spiders and people losing their eyes, she ignores this.

**I slunk along the silent hall  
Of ancient ore attired in grime –  
Feculent beyond the nose;  
No bearing here, nor feel for time.**

The Cat is her companion through everything, wandering from the Palace to Portland without any clear reason, except to enjoy a can of tuna, then bathe in the catnip she grows in her window box. She hears him talk in her dreams, and he is the one who tells her.

_"__You're not going to be able to pretend forever," he says in one of her dreams. In it, they are riding her old hairclip, now come to life as a real dragonfly, and there is a wolf in the grass bellow._

_"__I'm not pretending. I'm carrying on. I'm living my life."_

_The cat smiles. "No you're not. You're pretending to live. You're hoping that it will stay away, aren't you?"_

_"__That what will stay away?" The Beldame is gone, locked away and not her problem anymore. _

_"__The button eyes. You're afraid that the evil you saw in those button eyes is still out there, hiding in something else, and that it's waiting for you."_

_Her stomach clenches, and in the real world, the Cat purrs to her. _

_"__She's gone. The Other Mother is gone."_

_The Cat nods, and she notices that the wolf in the grass is behind them now, watching her with smooth skin where there should be eyes._

_"__There are more than spiders lurking in this garden," he tells her. _

Coraline wakes screaming with the feel of a wolf's breath on her neck.

**I shuddered in appreciation –  
The ambience would mortify  
A feeble mind, aghast, opined  
Of murky thought, and typify**

The next week, she sees a report of a bear mauling in a newspaper. Two joggers had been attacked on a trail, the man dragged off and the woman left raving in a mess of blood. The tv station picks it up, and soon Coraline is listening to a woman being carted off to a hospital.

"It wasn't a bear!" The woman shouts to the cameras. Two men in scrubs are trying to pull her away, into the privacy of the hospital behind her. "It wasn't a bear! The wolf! The wolf took my husband! He laughed at us and talked!"

A chill runs through Coraline's spine, then forms a tight knot of panic in her heart. The woman's eyes were lucid, and though her features were a little gritty, her face was filled with honest horror.

The Cat is watching her from her window with an expression that seems to imply _expectation_.

"It's not real," she tells it. "It's not _real._ There are spiders, and there are…places, maybe, but I will not—"

The Cat cuts her off with a hiss and a roll of his eyes. He leans to the left of the window, so that his head disappears, and then there is the sandpaper tongue licking her cheek from behind her cupboard door. His head smiles at her, and his body twitches its tail from the window box accross the room.

"You won't what, Coraline?" he says, and she pinches herself sharply. It's not a dream.

The Cat grins and then all of it is gone again.

She passes out.

**The will of Belial err I brought  
Upon myself to loathe and dread  
Exquisite retribution: to linger  
Oftentimes alive, then dead.**

When she comes too, she is already starting to hyperventilate, her fingers buried in the carpet and white at the knuckle.

She cries for an hour, trying to let the sobs and the horror wash over her in a quick wave, so that when she is done, her face is blotchy but calm.

Ok. Spiders and buttons. Wolves and joggers. Weird, but this is still reality, and hell, it's her turf, not some crazy powerful soul-sucker's, right? In the Other-Mother's world, there were no rules that she could depend on, no confirmation that the people and the walls and the gardens around her wouldn't melt or fall apart. In this world, though, she has a Cat, she has books, and she knows very well what can and can't happen.

It's a bald-faced lie, but it helps her get her feet under her, and she heads to the library for a long day of research.

**Compulsion saw me edging on  
Toward a narrow door of oak.  
Behind, I knew, a greater evil  
Waiting in her fusty cloak.**

Twenty hours later, another jogger is dead, no witnesses, and the woman from the first attack has been released to her house, where a package is waiting.

The woman touches it like she is afraid it is alive, but the note on the front makes her feel almost like it's alright to open it.

_A spider bit me. I bit back. Do the same to your wolf_.

Inside is a rusty, nearly ancient silver candlestick, one end cut crudely into a terrible point. There are purple flowers tied to the pointy end, with a skull and crossbones written on a note nearby.

Poison. Silver steak. She understands.

**A choice of nil upon the table;  
Aught of leave, I had to face  
Alone the shrew – her flaming aura  
Angling me; my deep disgrace**

Coraline doesn't hear about any other dead joggers, and she figures things are, if not ok, then at least quiet now.

The Cat only smirks at her.

She stops giving it tuna, and tries to lock it out of the apparment for spite.

Of course it doesn't work.

**From ugly deeds I dealt in life,  
A heinous world I honed in glee…  
'Now take a crooked path to death,  
For I have come to torture thee! '**

She doesn't know how, but the woman with the candlestick finds her. She brings a man with her to the antique store she works at, to talk to Coraline about some kind of fish-horse that ate his sister and now haunts his mother's pond, laughing at him with wet eyes.

Coraline tries to kick them out, denying everything, from the candlestick to the cat that can be in two places at once. They leave, the woman with understanding eyes, the man with confused hurt common in such people who tell the truth only to be mocked.

The woman jogger ushers the man out, understanding in her eyes, and gratitude, and Coraline wants to throw rocks at those awful, understanding eyes.

**Out of eyes of orange flame,  
A piercing glare, then here it came –  
The cackling cry of chanting song: **

Eventually, she gets tired of nightmares of fishy-horses and understanding eyes in the face of a half-eaten corpse that looks like the man, so she sighs and pulls out a small box she has not used since she was little.

Inside is a sweater that glows with stars, a yellow rain slicker, her cap, pliers, a dragonfly barrette, and a stone with a hole in it that makes one think of a rotten tooth.

She cannot be the little girl she used to be. But she is still the person who bit a spider back. So she throws away the jacket and turns the sweater into a scarf. She goes out and buys a red slicker, and boots with stars that glow. She ties back her long hair with a dragonfly, and dons the old hat with new goggles from Wybie that see in the dark. Then she ties the stone to the flashlight so that it casts a narrow beam through the hole, and she hopes it will help.

She is still Coraline, but now she is grown, and ready, she thinks, to move forward.

The Cat takes her to the pool.

**'You thought you'd die alone in pain  
The once – nay nay! you'll die with me,  
And so a catch: you'll die again  
Ad infinitum - ever be!**

Fighting the fish-horse means fighting a kelpie, and it sucks.

The Cat scratches out its right eye, and she bridles it with her belt, then applies her old pliers to its fangs. She goes away from the pool wet with blood and pond slime, with bruises shaped like hands and hooves. The Cat doesn't wait for her, only hisses at the pool, which is still bubbling, before vanishing around a tree trunk.

She lies on the banks of the pond, two teeth in her hand, gasping and cold. Eventually, the bubbling in the water stops, and something small and wet comes to the surface.

It is the chewed hand of a child, grasping a Barbie that has rotted in the murk. It makes her puke into the dirt, but eventually, she wraps the thing in a piece of plastic she digs from the trash in her car.

Three days later, she feels alive enough to limp to the fridge and bring out the hand. She finds the man, calls him up, and asks about when his sister disappeared.

He tells her she was eight, and loved Barbie's, and she has to put the phone down to throw up again. Then she asks if he would like to bury her remains.

He weeps over the phone, and collects the hand.

She keeps the teeth of the kelpie, and the Cat smiles.

"Time to sleep, Coraline. You'll need your rest."

**Your soul to curse, my heart we'll gore,  
Your liver to draw and quarter;  
A sadomasochistic pair,  
We'll slither together in slaughter! '**

Somehow, word spreads about a girl with a rain coat and a magic stone made of candy. She wants to hate the jogger, but it's hard to be angry about this new life when everyone is so afraid, and so grateful to see her coming. Wybie fights with her about the whole thing, telling her she's crazy, stupid, and several other things that he later regrets.

Still, she doesn't argue the fact. She is wearing her childhood nightmares on her sleeves and looking for trouble in all the places where she is guaranteed to find it. She is the walking definition of someone with "unresolved issues," but she hopes that, with every stupid encounter with something that lives under the bed and shouldn't be possible, she is taking bleach and a sponge to the dark stain on her heart that is still ten years old and terrified of the little door in her house that leads to a brick wall (and thank god, but it has never _ever_ opened up to anything else).

She knows that running from the Beldame is what led her to this world, and trying to run now is like trying to glue a mirror back together—the cracks would be even worse for trying to ignore them.

Wybie takes some convincing, but after a bizarre conversation with a flesh-eating ghost that almost costs both of them some blood and teeth marks, he stops hating her side jobs and just tries to help her survive them. He graduates college, works at a lab, and builds her an armory of books and folk remedies for every evil she comes across (and some she hopes _never_ to meet). They watch shows like "Buffy" and "Supernatural" and compare notes over lemonade and cotton candy.

After a few years, the Cat starts sleeping on her stomach at night, and she wakes up in the dark sometimes to hear it talking to no one, eyes fixed on her lower abdomen.

One night, she opens her eyes and has to bight her lip from the pain—the Cat is gone, and there is a huge, fat spider on her stomach. It has bitten her navel.

She screams, passes out, and Wybie runs her to the hospital with all the panic of a man who thinks his wife is dying. There, she learns that the baby that was growing is gone.

When the Cat shows its face again, it is half dead from the poisonous bites on its paws. She does not fret over the loss, but sprays _Raid_ around the bed and puts Citronella in her pajama pockets.

The bite leaves black marks around her belly button, and she tries not to see the button shape in it.

**I answered only with a scream, from  
Sensing near her craving lust.  
My crimes to answer; wrongs annul;  
Renounce my soul and turn to dust...**

Ten years later, she is the mother of three children who have a strange love of bugs and hand-sewn dolls. They give her nightmares sometimes, but she loves them no less for these dark omens, and keeps her house obsessively clean of all species of arachnid.

When the last of the tenants die, she and Wybie burn down the Pink Palace and fill the old well with cement. They salt both areas and build an inn, filling it with children who are loved and wildly eccentric visitors who are better than anything she can imagine.

She leaves food for the rats and admires that the Cat never ages, and when she works in the garden, she feels that there are moments in her life that are quiet, good, and soft.

The Cat never speaks again.

**On an evening cool and quiet,  
Stretch an ear to listen tight –  
Are you lucky of a moment –?  
Hark! my clarion call of plight.**

'Beldame of Death' by  
Copyright Mark R Slaughter


End file.
